Where is data warehousing going?

April 22, 2005      (Page 1 of 2)

Time-based transformations of business processes are becoming competitive necessities, the Teradata CTO argued. He explained the concept of “extreme data warehousing” where response times are measured real-time in milliseconds, and enterprises have the ability to exploit all business relationships in the data.

Traditionally, ETL tools run under the data warehouse and are used to pull out source data, transform and clean it in a required format, and load it into the warehouse. The current shift is towards the real-time data warehouse, Brobst said.

These real-time enterprise (RTE) implementations include data warehouses that provide real-time access to data, and those that acquire data in real time. Either way, organizations should avoid vendor hype, Brobst noted. Service level requirements should be driven by the business need, not the technology.

The goal is the active data warehouse, where data is accurate up to the minute, is always-on and there is support for large data volumes, mixed workloads and concurrent users, Brobst said.

Right now, technology is not the limiting factor, Brobst said. Rather, it is all the legal, and ethical questions surrounding data access.

Who will ultimately be responsible for the accuracy of data of the reliability of the analytics? Are the proper security measures in place? Who will ultimately be held accountable? These are the issues that enterprises will be faced with moving forward, Brobst said.

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Source: IT World Canada